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I find when Apple employees leave something important out, like licensing, it's because others haven't yet made the decision -- in other words, it's not final.

I find when Apple employees leave something important out, like licensing, it's because others haven't yet made the decision -- in other words, it's not final. I personally would have expected that if Apple were not making the code open source, they would mention its exclusivity and emphasize it as a training program for schools, etc. Realistically, it's just time -- like LLVM improvements or past work on Objective-C, expect everything up to the REPL as open source, but playgrounds and docs under proprietary license or completely closed would be my guess. If not now, some time in the future as .NET further open sources or if they want to encourage Swift as a JS competitor.

mikeash 12y ago
Or the decision has been made but it's not ready to be announced yet, for whatever reason. Apple is notoriously secretive. They hate saying anything ahead of time if they don't have to. They could have committed (internally) to open sourcing Swift when they started on it four years ago, but they still probably wouldn't say anything until they day it happens. If they thought they could get away with it, they'd have kept the very existence of Swift secret until the public release, but they need feedback from third-party developers at this point.